Complain or learn to counter?

A well placed Diversion will halve a touch rangers damage output, if you get a second one on as well all they can do is run.
Spiteful spirit will sort em out too as most wil be spamming and not watching their status bar.

There we go... more skills that are anti-warrior too. Can anyone make a list of skills that are anti-touch ranger and NOT anti-warrior?

Here are skills that are anti-warrior but dont work against touch rangers:

Empathy,
Insidious Parasite,
Enfeeble,
Throw Dirt,
Blinding Flash ,
Ward against melee,
Kinetic armor,
reckless haste,
price of failure,
spirit of failure,
Protective Spirit,
Shield Guardian

Being a 'noob' that cannot learn to counter I am sure I have missed tons of other anti-warrior skills that dont work against touch rangers. Even then, please at least give me 12 skills that are purely anti-touch ranger.

^^ your post is quite off topic. (mine is too, sorry)

Anyway, why do you need 12 skills that are anti-touch ranger? Why not just have a necro throw on SS (anti-warrior and anti touch all in one skill). Also, take a snare, most groups will have a snare with them (again, anti-warrior and anti-touch ranger). You only need a skill or two, that most people will bring anyways, to counter them.

The point of my post is simply this: I see many people claim that touch rangers are ok and can be easily countered. Almost all of the counters they mention work against warriors too, since they also have to operate in touch range. So we have a huge set of skills that are anti-warrior, but only a tiny subset of those are anti-touch ranger. Adding that to amount of armor ignoring damage + self-healing + defence that touch rangers have makes them unbalanced.

QFT. Plus show me any other class in the game that can compress their entire damage AND healing capability into two skill slots, leaving six free for whatever anti-counters they want.

lol i LOVE PsyD. Sure its spammable, but its only really effective vs skill-reliant builds. Wars can DPS right through it.

Its a powerful skill with a HUGE cost, so i think its balanced.

All most uber builds need to be countered is one skill. I shut down Touch Rangers on a regular basis with just one spell. However, my current build of choice is also very weak against certain builds. There is a counter for every skill. It just takes some thinking to find it.

Here's the easy way my assassin counters them...

Binding Chains.

Go kill someone else and leave them stuck there.

Only people who are not good at the game call people who beat them newbies or insult their build.

Over the history of Guild Wars Anet has always way over-nerfed things that did not need nerfing at all. Ie: smiting, IWAY.

This makes the game less fun because any common build that does not completely suck will cause mass hysteria amongst bad players who make illegitimate complaints about it until Anet caves to them and nerfs it.

That trend leaves people with even less quick-party builds to choose from, and just makes Guild Wars PVP even more uninteresting because every time Anet nerfs the latest common build that bad players complain about, everyone will just migrate to the newer one until Anet unjustly nerfs that too. Then the cycle continues, resulting in one single build dominating PVP as a direct result of Anet's unnecessary nerfing. Whereas if they stopped nerfing things due to mass hysteria of bad players, there would be many common quick-party builds to choose from by now and much more variety and fun in PVP.

Touch rangers do not need nerfing. A time for the end to the nerfing madness must come. That time is now.

So your solution to kiting is switching targets and/or a speedboost? How is this unique to touch rangers? Kiting is effective whether you're up against a warrior or a touch ranger.

You have exactly one trick, a speedboost. That's it. Touchers aren't any harder to kite than any other melee range class.

Anyone who isn't retarded isn't going to stick around once they've crippled you...

There's a fine line between covering all bases with legitimate reasons why a build is broken and going "It's broken because I can't beat it."

While there ARE legitimate uses of "it's fine, learn to play" of course there are some people who say that when they actually mean "It's not broken because I play this build."

i just wish people could have a real discussion about skill balancing. for example the thread on touch rangers... it seems to have turned into a bitch fest over the fact that people dont like nerfs... i notice none of the facts about touch rangers ever came up(yea i know i started it... i am almost regretting it now)... like what is the DPS of a touch ranger? how does that compare to the dps of degen? what are the standards to determin how one skill balances another? there are alot of real issues we could be talking about --but yall like to complain about complainig too much.

I didn't think you were hun and you are one of the few people who agree with my posts but I love you just the same (That word elitest gets to me like nothing else tho -_- sorry!)

However I think if every class worked at it they could find a counter. I mean look at IWAY, there are still so many people shouting this exact same argument, it's broke, over powered, should be fixed and so forth..... But while all this might be true and not every team or person can over come an IWAY - it IS possible and that was my only point, that if these people who complain so much work at it they can find a way to beat it. The problem with randoms is that it is random and teams are often thrown together with a monk and damage. I am sure tho that a really good practiced guild team could come up with some way. Ya can't counter everything all the time and this is the biggest issue in all areas, but that is part of the game. You are never going to find anything that can counter across the board.... and if you do.... PM ME Cause I have indeed looked into this and our guild came up with a viable way to deal with most in HoH but we still have issues with ranger spike -_-

But it seems that more knowledgable people have come into the debate so I will indeed step out *bows* Thanks for the pleasant response and I hope you don't think I was flaming you, I just always seem to come across like that (Honestly it's a habbit -_-)

You think Diversion and Spiteful are purely anti warrior? Diversion is anti caster if anything and Spiteful works on every class going.
There are no anti-touch ranger skills because a touch ranger is not a class it is a build, to counter a build you look for the weaknesses in it.
You list skills that are anti-warrior but dont work against touch rangers? Why on earth should they? A touch ranger is nothing like a warrior. Every skill you have listed is a counter to a melee attack, touch rangers are not melee.
To counter you have to stop them touching you. Kite or shut down their skills.

Escape has evasion. Evasion may not be unique to touch rangers, but it is unique to rangers. The evasion rate is 75%. For the most part, you shouldn't get hit with any crippling attacks. When you are, escape takes you back up 25%, so you may catch the crippler, or, more likely, you'll catch one of their team mates who didn't watch you get crippled. If it's rare that a good crippler sticks around to admire the job, it's rarer still that a good player gets kited away from the rest of the action.

Kiting warriors is more effective because they lose adrenaline while they are being kited. Touch rangers gain energy. Touch rangers actually benefit from having enemies run away (because if you're running, you're doing nada and the TR is gaining energy, while flipping through a list of potential targets).

An axe can crit at around 80 on a 100AL. I don't understand your point. Bosses in PvE have double damage because they are dumb, and need to be buffed.

An intellegent player knows when to hit you with their adreno spike, so the effect is often more deadly. Eg. KD hit hit KD hit hit. An AI boss might get lucky, but it is done by design in PvP.


Edenial quite happily neuters touchers, they are rangers so have lower e-regen anyway, so you can plop surge, burn and weariness and slap ether lord, they are bottomed out and will stay bottomed, if thats not enough, blackout and boom they are useless.

If its a team, then you pick them off one by one, its tricky but it can be countered by normal balanced teams reasonably. The mesmer in question is a shutdown anti monk mesmer, so its not a special build either.

A touch ranger is like a warrior in the sense that they have to be in melee range to do any damage. All the counters everyone mentions against touch rangers apply to warriors also.

Please tell me how kiting or shutting down or degen is any different from using them against warriors? I listed anti-warrior skills to show how many counters exist against a them. The point was there are too many counter skills for warrior builds where as you or anyone has not been able to show me even 1 pure anti-touch ranger skill.

Every anti-warrior skill gives me a weakness in warriors. A simple excercise can prove that touch rangers are unbalanced. Simply list all skills that are anti-warrior. Then list skills that are anti-touch ranger. You will see for yourself how unbalanced those lists are.

Cripshot cannot be blocked/evaded. Semi-spammable. Gg? Besides, good touch rangers don't use escape, they use OoB. Energy is touches, which = life. Mesmer/ele snares, no evading those either.

This "touch rangers benefit from kiting" is really quite stupid. They benefit from getting less touches off on people, and gaining less health/dealing less damage? Don't think so. Besides, OoB is for energy management, relying on kiting to regain energy is...dumb. Oh, and this "kiting shuts down the person running" statement works both ways... they've shut you down too.

Warriors are a character class which is why there are skills which can be called anti-warrior and as I said there are no skills which are specifically anti-touch ranger because they are not a class they are a build. The question your asking is like asking why are there no skills specifically made to work against blood spike or earth ele's or boon prots.
Anet didnt think about touch rangers and stick in a secret special skill just to counter them which will turn them into whimpering kittens.
To beat them you have to use what is available to you.

the problem with a shutdown mesmer is that they are only a support char... they will not be able to kill a touch ranger alone... sure they can slow them from spaming skills but for the most part shutdown mesmers won't kill anyone. -- note that with expertiese thise skills dont need much energy-- it should also be noted that edenil keeps gettin hit with the nerf bat.

Look no one here cares about semantics that warriors are a class and touch ranger is a specialized ranger build. The point is there are too few counter skills against a touch ranger. So why is it ok in your book that there are waaaaaay too many skills that can counter warriors (whatever build they use) and touch rangers are affected by so few? Why doesnt that show that an unbalance does exist in terms of the existing skill set as far as touch rangers are concerned?

And no, the question I am asking is nothing like your example. I wish I PvPed a little more to answer that in depth. But suffice to say there are tons of skills that can counter a blood spike, earth ele or boon prot.

ZOMG I would love a skill like this!!1!

"I'm using Whimpering Kitten on X!"

*poof*

"Meow??"

Crip Shot = Elite. That's also only one profession, with a specific build probably for anti-touch tactics. That goes to the heart of the problem right there, the over-specialization borne by touch rangers. And that still doesn't solve speed boost + plague touch concerns provided you're near some other enemy.

Good touch rangers don't use OoB*. Having lots and lots of energy in lieu of damage mitigation for a damage spike class is just a bad idea. Without OoB you can still toss off 7-8 bursts of 65 damage, with intermittant wanding regaining you energy (because you're not using it) and finishing fleeing targets. If you can't kill someone with that, your team must not be clicking together very well at all. Tossing OoB should generally save you 75% of the damage you would take from warriors, rangers, and, most of all, assassins (where you may save even more than that by shutting down combos). The resultant gain in endurance makes the touch attacks even more effective as self heals, and saves your team as a whole lots of energy that otherwise would have been spent protecting you. You won't touch as often, but your touches will be better timed and more ably applied. (and in any other conversation, that line would sound horribly inappropriate. :P)


I never said that they benefit from touching people less. I said that they benefit from you running from them, letting them recover. If you're running, they're at least shutting you down until they can gather enough strength to perform a feat that may very well destroy a member of your team, and will leave them in great shape following it. What are you gaining from running that compares to what they will do when they're fully recovered (assuming you're not a toucher yourself)?** Simple logic suggests that if your recovery doesn't result in at least as impressive a gain to you as it does to them, you're losing the 'attrition war' that is inherant in kiting.

* At least from my experience, OoBers*** tend to drop properly (usually from assasins after one of their more limited stances ends) while escapers (and I wasn't the only one) tend to hold up longer, and know how to engage in psychological warfare well enough to lull others into thinking their energy has been depleted.

** I should note that an Escape using build will fall to an OoB using build 1v1 (from what I've seen of it). This only makes sense of course, as both have armor/evasion/blocking ignoring attacks, but one has a greater pool to draw from. However, having another variant of a build as a limitation on that build hardly seems suggestive of either balance or build superiority.

Wait, what? Cripshot Rangers have been around for a while, and they're anti preasure, anti kiter. Now they have slightly expanded use. That's not over specializing, that's just using what's already there.

Heh, kinda like the touch rangers. :P

Evasion is irrelevant to kiters, duh. They're kiting you. As for "crippling attacks", the only ranged one I can think of that's actually stopped by escape is pin down. Cripshot, caltrops, crippling dagger, return, all of those will merrily ignore your 75% evasion.


You've got to be kidding me. Do you have any idea how long it takes for you to lose your adrenaline charge? A damn sight longer than it takes to catch up and strike a kiting target, that's for sure. Warriors also benefit from autocrits and the fact that their attacks leave them standing for less time than a toucher (1.33 secs for axe/sword, vs 1.5 for a vamp touch counting aftercast). If anything warriors are superior in the face of kiting.

After reading all the blurb here how overpowered touch rangers are I decided to spend a couple of hours in RA to see what its all about.

I encountered 6 touch rangers and (I'm playing W/N) purposely sought them out and went one on one with them, of those 6 only 1 managed to inflict serious enough damage to me that I ran from him. The other 5 I killed without too much difficulty.

Having said that, the amount of atrociously bad players, and especially warriors, in RA is astounding, out of 8 teams I was in only *1* that was able to get 10+ wins, if the monk hadnt left we'd have gone on to a lot more I suspect.
I encountered not a single warrior who had Hamstring, most of them were Wammo's with the occasional W/E, and none of them had any way to deal with conditions.

Before anyone calls me elitist or experienced, I earned my first Gladiator title point today, I have *1* fame, I consider myself a total noob in PvP.
I'm sorry but if touch rangers are nerfed because of the complaining done by these people it will be a seriously sad day for GW. There is nothing amazingly good or overpowering about them.

Last post and I'm calling it a day:

Fair enough. Wouldn't say that touch rangers of today are the same as yesterday though.


Crip dagger has 'if it hits' in its description. I'd assume its subject to evade. Haven't used it though, so I have no idea. Caltrops is a ten energy hex for an assassin that doesn't contribute to your damage payload, or any strategy in general as assassins have better ways to kite. Return is one of the least efficient ways to teleport, which makes its utility limited. This is the problem I'm seeing. R/N dual touchers are paragons of efficiency (damage and heal, remove and cause conditions, evade and increase speed, evade and damage, nothing but hexes stick.) Answers to R/N touchers are not as efficient (cripple, and that's it, snare and maybe a little (very little if water hex v. ranger) damage, and so on. (Mesmer hexes, particularly degen, are effiicient, however, because they can be used as part of an overall effective plan.)


1. The point isn't so much that a warrior must run out of adrenaline every time he gets kited as that a warrior not hitting is a resource waste while a touch ranger not hitting is resource gathering.

2. A sword attack has a 0.17 shorter delay than a vamp touch. Fine. A sword attack doesn't heal you.

3. Physical attacks of all kinds are still subject to a healthy stable of counters. The same is true of spell/hex counters, etc. The same is not true of touch attacks and stances. TRs use touch attacks and stances while other builds do not to accomplish the same thing.

4. I'm done arguing the point for now. I see both sides fairly well entrenched. Besides, the OP didn't even care about touch rangers (or so he said) :P. The issue was balance. My belief remains that a build isn't balanced if it suffers less hate than its competitor builds by nature of the game's design. As has been mentioned by previous posters, when anything that works against a particular build also works against all other builds designed for the same purpose, but the superset of skills that work against all the other builds do not work for that build, that build is superior to all other builds for the same purpose. In a game that is designed to encourage competition in that niche, superiority = imbalance. When someone suspects that such a situation has occurred, they should be able to engage in a conversation about it without resorting to veiled insults and petty witicisms. This is called 'constructive criticism'. Whining, whether for or against something, requires the extra element of pre-emptive personal attacks and the denigration of others. (I'll admit it before someone brings it up ... I began posting on this thread to whine about the whiners who were whining about whining ... proof, I suppose, that whining begets more of itself rather quickly).

Just because you can't figure out the touch ranger weakness, doesn't mean it needs to be nerfed, it means you need to use your brain.

The ONLY build i feel needs to be nerfed (again) is iway. Not because of the power or lack of skill to use, but because it's near impossible to find a PUG in HA if you don't play iway.

I personally will not play iway, its degrading and an embarrassment, but at the same time that's all anyone ever plays there, so unless I'm in a guild that plays HA often, there's no way to even enter halls. And people wonder why I hardly have any rank, making it that much harder to get INTO good guilds. Thank god for my immense gvg experience or I would be toast.

by far the cheapest build in RA/TA/AB ^^

I give up on debating about whether or not anything needs nerfing. No matter how many counters exist, people refuse to use them, and just say the build needs nerfing. Fine, whatever. Nerf it all to hell, for all I care. I'll just play another game, because this one is infested with subpar players who somehow always get their way. ;p

QFT.

ANET should add a skill that counters only life stealing skills with a touch description, and make it about as playable as Keystone Signet and Otugyhs Cry are. This way all the scrubs who complain there are "less counters" can get a specific counter that's totaly unsuitable for PvP play and be happy. Even though the counters to warriors and such are a class counter, not a build counter... This skill could be named "z0mg wtf I'm a total scrub anet couldn't nerf my scrubness, so they gave me this skill instead."

Snares and energy debilitation. Touch of Agony isn't scary and they aren't going to keep it up, and Vampiric Touch every 5 seconds is largely irrelevant. Degen and other armor ignoring damage is effective as well. The only thing I really like about the touch template is how it retains / becomes more effective against warriors. You can sit on one without giving up damage per attack, the Touch of Agony keeps them from Frenzying, and they can't kite you like a mid/backline character without giving up a lot of effectiveness. Against ranged characters, touchers are pretty poor. They don't have any sort of disruption and can't spike.


Same as it has always been, focus on the trappers and keeping the Edge of Extinction down. If all trappers are dead focus kill warriors one at a time. They have minimal defenses and you need to exploit that.


See, there's your problem with facing iWay. You're attempting the two worst strategies possible against it. Chasing their necros is a waste of time, one of those guy's jobs is to mitigate damage by running away, and it's always a good trade for them to make. Similarly falling into defensive mode is a recipe for disaster, they have eight guys dedicated to offense and that will eventually break all but the most extreme of defenses. Against iWay you're on a short clock to kill a team with minimal defenses. You'd better learn to race. If you're wasting time on things that don't matter instead of racing it's no wonder that you're losing.


An interrupt that can't be stopped by Mantra of Resolve is broken? Power Block has a nice history of being used to shut people down through a Mantra, and blacking them out on top of it. But why does that break a skill when very few people run Mantra of Resolve or Concentration in the first place? Mantras aren't the counter to interrupters. Never have been. The counter to an interrupter is a warrior. If he's getting blasted he can't interrupt.

Psychic Distraction guys are annoying, not good. Remember playing against those dumb mesmers in arena with 6 interrupts and Wastrel's Worry or the like? Did you think they were any good? A typical Distraction guy isn't any better. After hit interrupts a skill you get a freebie with a cast time of two seconds or less that he can't even touch. Distraction costs 10, and he can't use emanagement to power it unless you let him. It is the most predictable template around because you know exactly what he has available after an interrupt. He's one trick. If you can't outthink one trick you have problems.

Distraction is a good skill against ritualists, water/fire elementalists, and death necromancers - it's a poor skill against virtually every other template. If for whatever reason he is annoying you can blast him with warriors to force a skill through. The main use of the skill is to interrupt Ghostly Heroes, for obvious reasons - everywhere else, it's a goofy template that a team's trying to ferry into the hall.


I think the general theme with your arguments is that you really don't understand how to counter things. You're trying to address offensive problems with reactive solutions, and much of the time that's the wrong way to look at things. You don't beat your opponent by staying alive longer (except when holding a dais), you beat him by killing him before he kills you. The right response to an attack isn't a block, it's a counterattack.

That's not to say that defensive measures are bad. It's just that your defense needs to be used to feed your offense. You cannot be using Ward Against Melee to create a bubble to hide in, for instance - you need to be pushing the Ward into the other team's face, setting up a defended spot from which to hit him even harder. The point of defense is to keep your offense alive long enough to beat the other team. Always keep that in mind.


That are not anywhere near as dangerous as a warrior. They do not need as many counters.

The big issue with a touch ranger in arena isn't that he's hard to counter, as much as his effectiveness is dictated more by the build than the player. That level of effectiveness is much, much higher than what a typical warrior in random arena will dish out. A touch ranger is going to Vamp Touch for 65 and Touch of Agony for 50. The warriors you find might not have even specced their weapon attribute.

Peace,
-CxE

Sounds like a touch ranger to me.

Tijger, I'd like some insight on how you withstood 65 dmg spam while doing enough dmg to outdo 65 dmg heals linked to the 65 dmg spam being done to you. Either you did nothing but kite the touchers with your W/N, or you spent all day knocking him down while someone else killed it. I too figured out a way to kill Touch Rangers with a W/N and it involved Virulence and I had a ton of fun doing it, but most of the time I was either dead or very near it by the time they dropped.

Sounds like one of those subpar nublets I discussed in my earlier post to me. See how fun making a witless assumption is? Whee.

I have no opinion on Touch Rangers, but just want to point one thing out: that there are counters to something has no bearing at all to whether that something is overpowered or not.

Consider: let's say Wastrels Worry did 600 points AoE damage over a wide area, but the delay before it 'triggers' was 10 seconds. If you were the target of WW, you would just have to use any skill within 10 seconds, but if you failed to do so it'd likely wipe the whole team. It's pretty obious this hypothetical neutron-bomb WW would be overpowered and in need of a nerf, even though it'd be easy to counter.

Oh, I could kill the touch ranger. It's the two warriors simultaneously hammering & knocking me down that's the problem.
The thing with being a mesmer in RA is that they're fragile, get targeted first (or second, if there happen to be a monk around), and get zero support.

Another problem is that hexes are if not useless so at least not as powerful as they used to be before Factions, because there are so many new & cheap ways of removing hexes, and mesmers don't have many unconditional direct damage spells.

These threads continue to leave my speechless. Just wow is all I have to say. Touch rangers can not kill you in one hit, nor can they solo a million people and they are definetly not the boogeyman soooo many players portray them as to be. Reasons people die to Touch Rangers usually goes into one of the following reasons:

A.) Lack of snares
B.) Player has no clue how to kite
C.) Player has no idea how to play and wants to be hand fed on how to play this game.
D.) Player just sucks. Period

I'm really sick and tired of seeing nerf threads in general due to lack of players being able to think of a counter on their own. Touch Rangers are in my opinion far from overpowered due to the fact that they are easy to counter as long as you continue kiting and your team has some general idea of how to PvP in general.

Crip dagger is a projectile which is why the "if it hits" clause is there. It's not an attack and will go straight through escape. Caltrops isn't there to let the assassin kite, it's there to snare the target. Whether you use it to escape or to cut down your target depends on the circumstances.

*shrugs*. They all seem lame in comparison to AoD. In terms comparing to recall-you sacrifice a pip of regen for a 10 second faster recharge. As an escape mechanism return seems quite good.

Sure they're efficient, but their weaknesses are severe:
* No endurance. With OOB you have around 30 seconds of touching before you run dry (at least with the dual vamp touch variant). Without it you have much much less.
* No spike
* A self heal that relies upon you being in melee range
* Severely vulnerable to disruption (diversion in particular).

People can and do exploit all of them, it's just that they don't want to because they've been carrying mass melee hate for so long (in the arenas at least) and don't want to change.

A warrior is gathering resources, he's just not gathering them as fast. To say that a touch ranger is better in the face of kiting because they're regaining energy is ridiculous, because that not acknowledging they have to a face an issue warriors don't even have to deal with, which is energy.

Correct, but they have 2 copies of vampyric touch. They orison themself and deal 60 points worth of life every 1.33 seconds.
Against rangers they have dodge (touch skills are not attacks), and against casters, they have elemental defense on their armor and with skills. The only effective way to beat a touch ranger group is with blood spikers (or as I said, snares) Caster spikes would also destroy them, but I'm not arguing that it's unbeatable, I'm arguing that it's broken, which it is. They have all the advantages of necro spikers, plus armor/evade bonuses. Their only drawback is that they have small range.



The builds I play the most are ranger spike and blood spike, which lose to apostasy constantly because our ONLY defenses against iway are 1: kiting (which doesn't work when we hit a trap or have to heal/spike) and 2: life bonds...which dont work for obvious reasons. Degen, smite, and other builds are great when facing iway, but again the point 'm making is that the skill is overpowered, here's why.

4 warriors + 4 pets on a ghost with a portable well of profane = gg. those 8 warriors and pets probably do close to 400 damage per second WITHOUT speed boosts, which is just rediculous. You need a team of 6 monks to stop that much damage without the use of bonds/seeds/other damage reduction skills.

Not to mention order of apostasy has mapwide range. since there is no way to kill the apoc necro, the only way to beat it is by killing 2 trappers (which is easy) and 4 warriors, half of which usually have sentinel armor. And you have to do this while your casters are kiting their butts off.

Power block doesn't have a 2 second recharge, but should be fixed anyway so it doesn't go through mantra. The 16 second shutdown is good enough, especially on a heal monk.

Most mesmers bring rods/offhands or staves. They have anywhere from a 2 second recharge to a 1/2 second recharge, also keep in mind that most group s that use a PD mesmer also have a bip. Good mesmers are easy to trick, but really good mesmers can completely shut someone down with this skill.

Do we really need another thread about Touch Rangers?